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A lesson in unschooling

As conventional educational systems struggle to look beyond academics, a new wave of alternate learning programmes are unschooling kids to to teach them unique life lessons. Gargi Gupta takes note

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There’s plenty wrong with the traditional education system—the pressure of marks; the straitjacketed subjects that don’t allow for any flexibility; ever increasing fees which deprives a large segment of children of quality education; unsympathetic and hidebound teachers; the heavy load of homework, projects and so on. No wonder then, that there’s a very active alternate education movement which seeks to provide children with a learning environment free of structural limitations.

THE MUSEUM SCHOOL: Seeing is knowing

Students in most schools get to see the inside of a museum once, or twice a year at best. But at the Museum School in Bhopal (and Navi Mumbai for the last six months), the museum is the school itself, the galleries the classrooms where children learn different subjects which are brought alive, in a very real ways, by the exhibits around them.

Museum School, an innovation by Bhopal-based social innovations lab OASIS, which won the UNESCO Education Innovation for 2016, has been functioning for 12 years now. Around 2,500 out-of-school children living in slums have benefited from its unique programme, some of them now in engineering college. “All cities that have large slum populations also have museums,” says OASIS founder-president Pradeep Ghosh. “Museums have subject focus—it could be science, natural history or arts & culture - and the exhibits can help children of all ages understand the concepts, irrespective of literacy levels.” So every afternoon, the children, aged 5 and above, are picked up by buses and taken to museums. The two-hour-long ‘lessons’ are conducted by educated girls from their slums, volunteers and B.Ed students. There’s no fee, and learning happens through play.

AAROHI LIFE EDUCATION: Come as you are

Imagine a place of learning without ‘teachers’, classes or exams, with no time-tables, periods, or boring chapters to mug. A place where you study what you like, set your own goals and decide how you want to realise them—go to a teacher or expert, conduct experiments, or read about it in books, or the Internet. And most importantly, evaluate yourself. That’s Aarohi Life Education, located 60 km from Bangalore near Kelamangalam town in Tamil Nadu.

As Aarohi co-founder Ratnesh Mathur says, “In the conventional system, curricula are geared towards Math or Science, but how much of it do you really need in daily life? And what about social understanding, emotions, aren’t they more important and shouldn’t these be taught? And anyway, who decides what the curriculum should be? We believe—let the child decide.”

Factually speaking, Aarohi does not call itself a school but a “learning centre”; it is not affiliated to any board, but children can take the class X and XII exams under the National Open School. It’s open to children upwards of 4-5 years of age who stay on “O-campus”—fives acres of undulating land where they can play, run around, grow vegetables, climb trees...whatever.

ISHA SAMSKRITI: Art for heart's sake

Most schools teach some art form or the other—dance, music, painting or theatre—allocating a period or two in a day to it. But at Isha Samskriti, run by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev’s Isha Foundation, the performing arts, particularly, yoga, Bharatnatyam, Carnatic music and Kalaripayattu (an ancient martial arts form) are at the centre of the curriculum. So the day at this school, located at the foothills of the Velliangiri Mountains near Coimbatore, starts with yoga, followed by lessons in music, dance and Kalari, with the conventional academic curriculum—Science, Math, History and the like—taken up only in the afternoons. Even here, like with Isha Homeschool, the emphasis is not on pushing children to cram and do well in exams, but on overall development.

Students at Isha Samskriti aren’t divided into classes but into small groups according to age and capabilities. “So everyone starts off at the same level and progresses according to how much and how fast they comprehend a concept. We have periodic assessments, no exams, and those who don’t do well are simply given more time to catch up. There’s no pressure,” says a senior teacher. Founder Sadhguru's philosophy would indicate that the most important work on the planet is to "raise human consciousness." Isha Samskriti, it would appear, is an endeavor to allow children to flower into their ultimate possibility of consciousness and capability.

POORNA: Feast on life

This school, set in a village within easy driving distance of Bangalore, has a unique weekly ritual—a community lunch. This is when one group of students cooks and serves a meal for everyone at the school. The students do everything. They plan the menu, go to the market to buy the vegetables and other ingredients taking care to stick within the budget, and then whip up the dishes (with some help from the staff). “It’s a great way for the students to interact with the local community and also how to transact,” says Indira Vijaysimha, who started Poorna as an experiment in homeschooling for her own children back in 1993.

But the weekly lunch is but one of several child-centric initiatives at Poorna. There’s the student parliament at which everything of concern to them, from waste segregation to bullying, is discussed. Oh, and students at Poorna are free to leave at any time in the middle of the class! There’s no syllabus, only some broad guidelines provided by the prescribed textbooks, and no exams before class VIII.

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